Let Me Paraphrase President Bush's speech tonight:

[andyfox]

"Let's say you (or anyone) had had a bad fire at your house or place of business, but not so bad as to completey destroy everything. Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that you would likely be more acutely aware of future potential fire hazards, or fire safety issues? In similar vein, after 9/11, we became more acutely aware of the potential dangers of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil."

Yes. But not from anything that involved Saddam Hussein. The two chief foreign policy spokespersons had asserted that he was not a threat, that he had not reconstituted his weapons programs. The president himself, in his 2003 SOTU speech, asserted that Hussein was not an imminent threat (reports in the media to the contrary). No, there was no sudden awareness or panic that the country was in danger because of Saddam Hussein. There was an awareness that we could use 9/11 to carry out the long desired aim of removing Hussein from power.

I don't see the humanitarian concern about the people of Iraq that you see. In a 1998 article he wrote for the New Republic Paul Wolfowitz wrote, "Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region." At the first meeting of Bush's incoming national security team on January 30 ,2001, an attack on Iraq was discussed. There was no talk of the humantarian plight of the Iraqi people, only talk of U.S. interests. Bush switched to pushing the humanitarian angle when he was after he made the case, which met opposition, for Hussein being a threat to our national security.

I think Lawrence Kaplan and William Kirsotl's book, The War over Iraq said it best: Our Iraq strategy was "so clearly about more than Iraq . . . more even than the future of the Middle East. " It would represent "what sort of role the United States intends to play in the world in the twenty-first century." It was, for the Bush administration, about the assertion of American power. It goes hand-in-hand with the reassertion of what the administration sees (as expressed by the vice president today) as the diminished power of the president to run foreign affairs.

We can aruge about whether this is a good thing or not, but not about the motivation of the administration in invading Iraq. The key players had said it should be done since 1998.